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Friday, November 27, 2015

Napoleon's Other Wife

Marie Louise

Napoleon’s
Other Wife

by

Deborah Jay

Eighteen-year-old
Habsburg Archduchess Marie-Louise leaves Vienna in 1810 to marry Napoleon,
Emperor of France, her father’s arch-enemy. Like her great-aunt
Marie-Antoinette forty years earlier, she believes her marriage will secure
peace between Austria and France. But others, unbeknown to her, intend to use
her marriage to bring down Napoleon for good. Unexpectedly, she finds Napoleon,
an adorable, loving, romantic husband and duly produces a dynastic heir. Married
to the Austrian throne, Napoleon believes himself impregnable and decides to
conquer Russia. But the Russians outwit him, and forge an alliance with Austria
and Britain, among others, to bring him down. Marie-Louise’s loyalty to her
husband and to France is heroic. The Allies capture Napoleon in Fontainebleau
and get him out of the country as fast as they can, leaving Marie-Louise and
her son to the Allies. Learning that she has been deceived by both her father
and husband, Marie-Louise decides to go directly with her son to the Parman
duchies promised her by the Allies on her husband’s abdication. But her claim
is hotly contested by the Spanish Bourbons. When Napoleon stages a return to
Paris from Elba and demands his wife and child, the allies unanimously declare
war on him. Having despatched Napoleon to St Helena after defeating him at Waterloo,
the allies grant her Parma, but there is a sting in the tail. In Parma, she
alleviates her misery by devotion to her subjects, who keep silent as regards
her private life. Remaining ever loyal to her husband, she introduces her own
legislation, placing Parma at the vanguard in terms of women’s and children’s rights,
and creates an oasis of enlightenment, resisting pressure from all other
reactionary rulers on the Italian peninsula to root out dissident elements.

Europe
is scandalised when the truth about her private life is revealed upon the
premature death of her chief administrator. Marie-Louise tries in vain to
protect her son by Napoleon from the vengeance that his enemies want to exact
as she fights to retain her Parman throne against the French and Spanish
Bourbons and against the forces of Italian patriotism, which Napoleon has
inspired. In the meantime, she works to achieve her offspring’s dreams and to
combat the impact of cholera, drought, floods and famine in her duchies. Disastrous
mismanagement in her absence of celebrations to mark the new liberal Pope’s
election precipitates her collapse. Within a fortnight of her death, revolution
spreads across the Italian Peninsula, engulfing her duchies.

Marie-Louise’s
battle against adversity and pursuit of happiness outside conventional morality,
compellingly narrated in Napoleon’s Other
Wife, are both relevant and inspirational to the woman of today. Napoleon’s Other Wife is also ideally
suited as recommended reading for ‘A’
and higher level studies in the French Revolution, Napoleonic period and the
Italian Risorgimento.

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